Steve Outing suggests that mainstream journalists can learn a few things from bloggers in Poynter Online:
"Big media has to learn to be more honest," says Jeff Jarvis, a media executive who moonlights as a blogger, "that is, to level with its public, to reveal its prejudices, and process as citizen journalists (bloggers) do."
The popularity of bloggers is leading to a new way of thinking about news. Jarvis said in an e-mail interview that the most profound thing he learned when he started blogging is this: News is a conversation, not just a lecture. The story doesn't end when it's published, but rather just gets started as the public begins to do its part — discussing the story, adding to it, and correcting it.
Jarvis is by day president of Advance Internet, the new-media arm of Advance Communications; by night he is the popular independent blogger behind BuzzMachine. As a 50-something media executive with a lengthy print-journalism background (including as a reviewer for TV Guide) and a new-found enthusiasm for blogging, he's well suited to advise the profession on striking a middle ground between traditional journalism and blogging.
"The news isn't done when we print it," he says. "That's when the public can add questions, corrections, perspective. That will improve news. And it also will change our relationship with the public."
One significant difference between mainstream journalism and blogging is the way each handles its mistakes. On this one, the bloggers seem to have an edge.
Although the working styles of bloggers varies considerably, some of today's leading bloggers take a similar approach to mistakes: They prominently post corrections to errors, publishing them quickly. Reynolds typically posts a correction of an earlier item as a new item at the top of the blog if the item in error has scrolled down the page, so his readers are sure to see it.
And because most bloggers embrace interactivity with their audiences, they hear about it when a mistake is made (via the comments areas on their own blogs, and from other bloggers noting and publicizing the error if it's significant) — and so do all the other readers.
Contrast that with how the typical old-media news organization handles mistakes. It's a rare day when a TV news program announces a mistake in the previous day's coverage; newspaper corrections typically are relegated to an inside page in a special corrections area, unseen by many readers."
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